Anti-Semite And

This Page Intentionally No Longer Blank Anti‐Semite and Jew JeanPaul Sartre [1944] Translated by George J. Becker Schocken Books ∙ New York Copyright © 1948 by Schocken Books Inc. Copyright renewed 1976 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under international and Pan‐American Copyright conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York. Originally published in France as Réflexions sur la Question Juive by Éditions‐Morihien. Copyright 1946 by Paul Morihien. Paris. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Sartre, Jean‐Paul. 1905— [Réflexions sur la Question Juive. English] Anti‐Semite and Jew / Jean‐Paul Sartre : Translated by George J. Becker : with a new preface my Michael Walzer. p. em. Previously published: New York, Schocken Books, 1948. ISBN 0‐8052‐1047‐4 I. Antisemitism. I. Title. DSI45.S2713 1995 305.8924—de20 95‐1929 CIP Manufactured in the United States of America First Schocken paperback edition published 1965. [‘95] 9 8 7 PREFACE Sometime in the second half of 1944, as the war in Europe drew to a close, Jean-Paul Sartre noticed that in discussions about postwar France, the imminent return of French Jews deported by the Nazis was never men tioned. Some of the speakers, he guessed, were not pleased by the prospect; others, friends of the Jews, thought it best to he silent. (Neither they nor Sartre knew how many of the deported Jews would never return.) Thinking about these discussions, Sartre decided to write a critique of anti-Semitism. Both the occasion and the subject of the critique were French. Having lived through the occupation, writing a year or so before the great celebration of the resistance began, Sartre addressed the complicity of the French in the Nazi project. He did so, however, at a level of abstrac tion that only few of the French found disturbing. The critique, as it turned out, was more disturbing to the v Jews, with whom Sartre meant to declare his solidarity. Sartre provides no account of the writing of Anti Semite and Jew. The book must hav~ been composed at breakneck speed, for it was ready to be excerpted in one of the first issues of Temps Modernes, founded in 1945. Though Sartre reports on a number of conversations with friends and acquaintances, he says that he did no research. He had read, of course, the most influential anti-Semitic writers-Charles Maurras and Maurice Har res; and he had encountered anti-Semitism in hi~ own family and among schoolmates at th~ Lycee. But h~ did not stop now to read about Jewish history or religion, and the only Jews that he knew were highly assimilated, with little more understanding than he had of either one. Among committed Jew~ he had no conneetions of any kind. So he wrote what he thought, describing a world that he knew only in part, reconstructing it in conformity with existentialist psychology and enlightenment skepti ci~m and the version of Marxist class anaJy~is that he had made his own. (In the ]940s, he regularly denied that he was a Marxist, but his commitment-to-come is evident in this book.) He produced a phi10sophical speculation var iously supported by anecdotes and personal observations. The result, however, is a powerfully coherent argument that demonstrates how theoretieal sophistication and practical ignorance can, sometim~s, usefully combine . VI There is much to criticize in the essay: reading it again fifty years after it was written, one sees immediately how much it was shaped by a specific (and no longer entirely persuasive) political orientation. Its ignorance of Judaism was willful and programmatic-for this parochial reli gious doctrine, and the community it shaped, and all such doctrines and communities, had no place in the world to come as Sartre conceived it, after the liberation of France and the future liberation of humankind. But the world as it is, France in 1944, is also Sartre's subject. He saw clearly that the defeat of the Nazis was not yet the end of the European catastrophe, and he set out, like many other intellectuals in the 19408 and '50s, to under stand the rootedness of prejudice, hatred, and genocide in his own society. Anti-Semite and Jew, in its best pas sages, stands with Theodor Adorno's study of the author itarian personality, Talcott Parsons' essays on the sociology of Nazism, Erich Fromm's Escape from Free dom, and Hannah Arendt's account of totalitarian pol itics. But Sartre's book should not be read as a piece of social science or even (as I have described it) as a philo sophical speculation. His best work in the 1940s was in drama (No Exit was first performed in 1944; The Respect- ful Prostitute in 1946; Dirty Hands in 1948), and Anti Semite and Jew is a Marxist/existentialist morality play, .. VII whose charaeters are produced by their dramatic inter a(~ti()ns. The interaetions are never actually enaet~d hy people with proper names; the dialogue h, never rendered in the first person. Everythin~ remains abstraet~ imper sonal., and y~l th~ "'si tuation~" and the "eh()ie~s"~ ar~ hi~hly dramatic. A~ in No f;xit, th~ ca~t of (:hara("t~r~ i~ small. It e()nsist~ of four act()r~: the anti-~emit~ .. the democrat, the inauthentie Jew, the authentie Jew. rrhe first and third of these play the lead~; the ~eeond and fourth have only minor parts-hence the drama i~ ~rim, not tragic finally., hut savagely critical of th~ world it describes. Waitin~ offstage to red~em the eritiei~m is the revolutionary worker. Thi~ i~ the structure of the Sartrean drama: ~aeh ehar aeter creates the ()ther~ and (:hoos~~ hlms~lf-and does both from the inside of a "situation" that Sartre com monly describes in a manner" at ]ea~t partly learned from Marx~ that ~ugge~t~ its det~rmini~t charaeter. rrhe drama ari~es from the interplay of social forces and individual deeisions. It i~ virtually impossible to jud~e the relative weight of these two. While Sartre always insi~ts that indi viduals are re~ponsihle not only for what they do hut also for what they are, it is nonetheless elear that th~y make their choices under duress. 'fhe tension is most apparent in the portrait of the anti Semite, which is commonly and rightly taken to hp. the VIIi strongest part of the book. The anti-Semite is fir~t of alJ a social-psychological type, shaped by the narrowness and vulnerability of the world he inhabits (Sartre writes about all four of his characters as if they were men, so I will use maseuline pronouns in discussing them). The description is familiar today, thou~h Sartre ib one of the first writers to provide it. The anti-Semite comes from the lower middle class of the provincial towns: he is a func tionary, office worker, small businessman-a "white col lar proletarian." Member of a declining social C)W,b, he is threatened by social change, endlessly fearful and resentful. He "possesses nothing," but hy i<lentifying the Jew as an alien, he lays claim to all of Franee. He is moved by a "nostalgia for ... the primitive community'" in which he can claim ascriptive membership: French by birth, language, and history, here he doesn't need to prove either his identity or his worth. The diversity and complexity of "modern social organization" are beyond his understanding; social mobility frightens him; the modem forms of property (abstractions like money and securities) are wholly mysterious to him. He sees the Jew as the initiate in these mysteries, the representative of modernity, the enemy of real Frenchmen, real property, the land, tradition, social order, sentimental attach ment--capilalist, communist, atheist, traitor. And he aims, finally, to destroy this sinister threat: "What [the . IX anti-Semite] wishes, what he prepares, is the death of the Jew." The rich, Sartre says, exploit anti-Semitism Urather than abandon themselves to it." And among workers, he confidently claims, ~~we find scarcely any anti-Semitism." This very precise class analysis, which locates the anti Semite in a fairly narrow segment of French society, poses a problem for Sartre's argument: if only a part of the society is anti-Semitic, why is the situation of the Jew so radically determined by anti-Semitism? In fact, Sartre is not wholly committed to hi~ class analysis. He starts indeed, from his own circle of family and friends, who came, mostly, out of the provi ncial petty bourgeoisie, but he moves on to a more abstract characterization. Anti Semitism is also "a free and total choice of oneself," and this choice, it seems, is made at every level of French society. Sartre gives his readers a sense of pervasive anti Semitism, motivated by a general fear, not only of ~pecif ically modern uncertainties but also of 44the human condition," which is to say, of liberty, responsibility, soli tude, and truth C'that thing of indefinite approxima tion"-Sarlre's argument about the fear of truth is very much like Adorno's "intolerance of ambiguity"). Some people, the lower middle class especially, are more threatened than others, but no one is entirely unafraid or x incapable of choosing the Jew as his enemy and himself as an anti-Semite. The anti-Semite creates the Jew, hut hefore that he creates himself within his situation. (But isn't this situa tion in part the creation of the Jew as the anti-Semite has created him? Sartre's argument is necessarily circular.

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